BORNSTEIN, ḤAYYIM JEHIEL

BORNSTEIN, ḤAYYIM JEHIEL (1845–1928), authority on the Jewish calendar. Bornstein was born into a ḥasidic family in Kozienice, receiving a traditional Jewish education and studying European languages and secular subjects, especially mathematics, on his own. He worked as an accountant in a sugar factory in the village of Manishev and then settled in Warsaw in 1881. From 1886 on he was secretary of the synagogue in Warsaw. Bornstein's knowledge of chronology, history, and mathematics enabled him to open new avenues in the study of the development of the Jewish calendar. He based his theories on several documents in the Cairo Genizah, the importance of which he was the first to recognize. Bornstein advanced the novel claim that the details of the Jewish calendar, with its small cycle of 19 lunar years and its method of reckoning the conjunction of the planets, had not been calculated and accepted until sometime between the mid-eighth and mid-ninth century c.e., and not in the period of the amoraim under *Hillel ii, as had been generally believed – much less in the first century c.e., as claimed by the German chronologist F.K. Ginzel. Bornstein published "Parashat ha-Ibbur" (Ha-Kerem, 1887), "Maḥaloket Rav Sa'adyah Ga'on u-Ven Meir bi-Kevi'at Shenot 4672–4674" (Sefer ha-Yovel Li-khevod Naḥum Sokolov, 1904), "Ta'arikhei Yisrael" (Ha-Tekufah, 1921, nos. 8, 9), and "Ḥeshbon Shematim ve-Yovelot" (ibid., no. 11). M. Teitelbaum's study of *Shneur Zalman of Lyady incorporated an appendix by Bornstein on Shneur Zalman's knowledge of geometry, astronomy, and natural science. Bornstein also translated several classics of general literature into Hebrew, among them the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz's Farys (in N. Sokolow (ed.), Sefer ha-Shanah (1900), 326–34), and Shakespeare's Hamlet (1926).

bibliography:

A.M. Habermann, in: S.K. Mirsky (ed.), Ishim u-Demuyyot be-Ḥokhmat Yisrael be-Eiropah ha-Mizraḥit Lifnei Sheki'atah (1959), 137–244; N. Sokolow, Sefer Zikkaron (1889); idem, in: Ha-Tekufah, 25 (1929), 528; idem, Ishim (1958), 101–43; Ha-Sifrut ha-Yafah be-Ivrit (1927); A.A. Akaviah, in: Ẓ.H. Yafeh (ed.), Korot Ḥeshbon ha-Ibbur (1931), introduction.

[Abraham Halevy Fraenkel]